by Chris Wright, MoreHorror.com

Italian horror movies are known for being different than American horror movies and this one is no different! A movie by Italian filmmaker Andrea Bianchi focuses on a zombie uprising after a crypt is disturbed in the region. Near as gory as a Lucio Fulci movie yet so drastically different, this movie offers up one strange macabre movie. This movie was released on VHS in the early 1980s by Vestron. Shriek Show released a DVD several years ago (thus now out of print) and there is a copy of this movie on a zombie pack released as well.

This movie is dubbed in English (since its made in its original language) and starts us off with an excavation inside a cave. We see Professor Ayres messing with old tombstones inside, which instantly leads to the zombie uprising. Ayres is brief and killed off instantly. This leads me to say that this movie is not character driven at all. The characters of this movie are of no importance whatsoever. There are two characters that you cannot forget based on the fact of how disturbing both of them are. The two characters are Evelyn (Mariangela Giordano) and her son Michael (Peter Bark). These two characters are a pair of the most disturbing I have seen in any movie. The son Michael looks like a man child (he is small yet looks 25) and he tries to have sex with his mother. Michael seems to have a sexual obsession with his mother. Furthermore, the mother doesn’t seem to mind that he does!

The zombies slowly but surely spring up around the area of a local large mansion. The zombies, affects wise, are top notch. The zombies are creepy, fairly realistic, and very maggoty. When they bite you or scratch you, you turn into one of them! They do, indeed, turn some of the people in the area into one of them. This brings me back to the mother and son pair. The son is turned in to a zombie at some point. The mother grieves but soon after he starts walking toward her. The mother literally wants her son to … suckle her breast. A “boy” who looks like a “man” she wants to have incest with. He proceeds to take a bite out of her breast. The gore is uber realistic and this is a creepy gory moment in the end part of the movie!

We are left at the end with the Mother bleeding to death and two other characters (Janet and Mark who are entirely forgettable) fixing to be taken by the zombies coming over them. The zombies at this point seem to want to perform rituals on them or to “experiment” on them. That was it. We are left with a quote “The earth shall tremble… graves shall open… they shall come among the living as messengers of death and there shall be the nights of terror…” ---Prophecy of the Black Spider. Some of that is misspelled because it was on the movie itself.

This may sound like one of the worst movies of all time. Surprisingly it may sound bad but you can’t help but watch it. It’s watchable, creepy, and realistic simultaneously. The gore is great, the musical score is top notch. There is cheesy dialog and some dubbing issues. The two characters I mentioned really are that disturbing. I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars. I liked it but I will fully understand if you wind up hating it. This movie has a 5.2 out of 10 on IMDB.

“Burial Ground” (1981)
Director: Andrea Bianchi
Written By: Piero Regnoli

Starring: Karin Well (Janet), Gialuigi Chirizzi (Mark), Simone Mattioli (James), Peter Bark (Michael), Mariangela Giodano (Evelyn)